Ok, so maybe I came off a bit harsh there. I've worked with a number of excellent security professionals who have found weaknesses and provided great prioritiza

Ok, so maybe I came off a bit harsh there. I've worked with a number of excellent security professionals who have found weaknesses and provided great prioritizations and solutions to the problems they've found. However that's not the case whenever some project on HN claims to use cryptography. The answer usually is: "you don't know what you're doing, so don't use cryptography." While that is "safe", for many it's not actionable: sometimes we actually do need to use it and not everyone can afford a security consultant. I wish instead there was a recommendation for some library out of the box that would handle everything from key management to supporting my specific use cases. Said a different way: I want an API that is simply giveMeANewKey() and encryptSecretMessage() and decryptSecretMessage() and the library takes care of both secrecy and integrity with strong defaults. You can't expect it to make the whole system secure of course, but I think a better API that makes it harder to shoot yourself in the foot (both by having sane defaults and being very opinionated to the point where it affects your system design) would go a long way, no? EDIT: looks like the stuff you linked to is more what I am looking for. I wish I had heard of them sooner!